Out

We went out to eat on Tuesday night. Normally this is not a momentous event at all but it is the first time we've done it since we hit the hard core health kick just after New Year's Day. All things considered, it was decent, but here are the lowlights:

1. I went to a restaurant that I knew had at least a few semi-healthy options. Their menu has changed since the last time I ate there...for the worse. Who does that in 2010? Restaurants of every type are making things healthier, yet I found a menu that offered me almost no solid options.

2. Bread and pasta=health fail. I had more bread than I should have. Same for the angel hair pasta. I've barely touched either the last three weeks, so it's fine. But I could have done better with a little less of each.

3. Salmon. One of the healthiest foods out there, and something I make at home about once a week now. And I like mine better. The restaurant salmon was overcooked and came with a citrus-balsamic glaze that tasted good, but was probably a little too loaded with sugar and badness.

4. Sauteed spinach. Wildly undercooked and especially bland. Or perhaps I just overcook mine at home and prefer it that way. But wow, I thought this would be the one sure thing going for me on my plate. I had to salt it up to make it halfway decent.

It was nice to get out. The kids were both good (for the most part, aside from A.J. climbing in the booth a little) and it was nice to have a quiet dinner away from home. But from a nutrition and taste point of view, it was frustrating just because the best parts of the dinner were the things that weren't good for me. And that's fine. It just reinforces the fact that I'm doing the right thing by having almost all of my meals at home.

EDIT: I wrote the above before I went to the gym on Wednesday morning...where I proceeded to have a great workout. I felt strong and added some weight to my upper body lifting routine. So the moral of the story seems to be that mixing in some somewhat bad carbs every now and then probably isn't bad at all.

Cook This, Not That

When I'm trying to be healthy, especially when I'm just getting started again and being really vigilant about eating, I need to eat at home. It's easier to make nutritious meals, but sometimes I get bored from making the same things over and over. So I recently picked up Cook This, Not That, a little cookbook from the "Eat This, Not That" company. It has been great so far. We do salmon once a week so on Monday I made their version, with an easy honey mustard glaze that was fantastic. Since I had bought fresh honey and dijon mustard, I wanted another recipe using those ingredients so I opted for chicken tenders with a honey-mustard-chipotle sauce and they were great. They were baked and had a panko bread crumb coating that made for a nice crunch. Then last night I made their sliders two ways, using 92% lean ground sirloin. One recipe was kind of a steakhouse flavor, with bleu cheese and mushrooms, and the other had bacon, cheddar, and a great spicy chipotle mayo. I've also used some of their recipes for side dishes and so far everything has been really delicious. In addition to the recipes, the book also gives complete and detailed nutritional information as well as offering a restaurant "not that" version of the same dish. The differences between things that look nearly identical can be staggering. It's so easy to make the healthier versions that you really have to wonder what restaurants are doing to make their stuff so bad for you.

And we're back!

Hi there, how are you? Long time!

Let's just skip the rambling explanation of the layoff, the wrap up of the various injuries and maladies, the cliched but valid enthusiasm brought about by the New Year, and just jump right back into this.

So, I'm now a father of, *gulp*, two kids. And I have returned to the challenging world of healthy living. I started back down that path, hopefully FOREVER, two weeks ago today, and it has gone very well so far. My first weigh in yielded an encouraging yet artificially inflated first week weight loss of over ten pounds. It was real, but inflated because the "before" weigh in was later in the day, I actually waited longer than a week to do it, etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda. But it's real. Week two has gone even better, judging by how I actually feel. I no longer turn into a ravenous monster that feels the need to feed after dinner like some sort of brain-munching zombie. Except, you know, not brains. Usually cereal in my case, strangely enough. But anyway...I'm working through that. The exercise is going well too. Beth is still home on maternity leave and A.J. is in school five days a week so I have the time and ability to knock out great workout sessions all week long. I even got to the gym five times this past week, which is the first time I've done that in...well, I don't even know exactly how long. I'd say nine or ten months, at least. But it is a long journey ahead of me. I still have quite a ways to go just to get back down to where I was in the spring. I'm shooting for that as an initial target, and then I'll ponder some other big-picture health goals.

So two kids. Yeah. That's...different. And certainly a topic that requires its own posts on another day. But thing are going very well with them so far. They are adorable together, and the experience the second time, at least for me, as something all new. As babies go, these two could not have been more different. I'm sure that will continue forever, and that's just part of the fun.